Have you checked OVHcloud? They had some experimental ARM range a while back but I think it was only in Gravelines. Might be worth a ticket to sales. Otherwise the used enterprise route is basically it for budget ARM.
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Secondhand market on LX2K is thin. I found mine through a surplus dealer in Chicago, paid $380 shipped. Took three months of watching eBay alerts. SolidRun had a fire sale on LX2K workstations when they moved to the newer LX2-Lite and that flooded the market briefly. Gone now.
If you're patient, university surplus is where these hide. Research clusters get refreshed on grant cycles.
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That's not bad. My Dell R630 idles at 110W and I hate it. Where's the bottleneck on the LX2K though? Memory bandwidth? Those A72 cores are old now.
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Update: spoke to two sellers, both want minimum 5 units and won't budge under $450 each. For edge deployment that's workable but my clients want 2-3 max. Going to pitch them x86 mini-PCs instead unless I find a liquidation lot.
That's actually in range if I can find one. The 16 cores and ECC sold me. How's the PCIe situation? I need at least one x4 NVMe and a 10G NIC.
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One x16 slot electrically x8, one x4, and one x1. The x8 runs at gen 3. I have a Mellanox ConnectX-3 in the x8 and a Samsung PM981 in the x4 via adapter. Works fine. 10G is doable, just don't expect bifurcation.
The catch: the firmware is picky about card initialization order. BMC console helps a lot for debugging boot hangs.
I looked at ARM servers for my colo in Lima and gave up. Import duties on anything from SolidRun or Ampere make it 40% more expensive than the sticker. Ended up with used Threadripper from a miner liquidation. Not ARM but the power bill is still okay.
The Altra prices are falling slowly. I watch the Hetzner auction boards and see them appear occasionally, still EUR 800+ though. For a render farm the efficiency is undeniable but the capex is brutal.
If your workload compiles to ARM cleanly, have you considered renting? Hetzner's cloud ARM64 is actually decent for burst work, just not persistent.
Following this thread. Same situation, 8 Pi 3Bs running homeassistant and some scraping. One SD card dies every three months like clockwork.
From Manila the shipping on any of this is painful. I looked at LX2K import and the freight was $180 alone. For that money I can buy three more Pi 4s and a bigger shelf.
